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Over the course of the semester, I have tried to understand how the internet aided in the construction of fan communities. The assignment brought forth a dizzying amount of raw data and a dizzying variety of ways to annotate it, and theories to apply towards it. Quickly, it all became a microcosm of the information overload that is the internet.
But without connection, it is all, if there is such a thing, useless information.
The challenge was to make all this (the data and the sources, the theories and the reading), as Neil Postman puts it, “important and usable.”
The challenge of knowledge has always been what to do with it. With all the affordances of the internet, it is only a tool, and no matter how much information can be culled from it, it is still, as Vannevar Bush writes, “the process of tying two things together is the important thing.”